About Me

Recovering academic, blogger-back-from-the-dead, and one-year veteran of the workforce. Now an organizational embed, with lessons learned from the trenches and stories to tell. All with a not-so-slightly academic twist.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Bloggenpfeffer Redux

1. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens2. All The Kings Men - Robert Penn Warren3. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

I wish it were five! I could add Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and Possession by A.S. Byatt! And a ton of Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather, George Eliot, Theodore Dreiser, Faulkner, Nathaniel West, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Evelyn Waugh...but you only get three apparently, and I always read and re-read these.

But these are really great bildungsroman and roman a clef type books that are so rich and satisfying, you can read them and feel immersed into a world. They are each a great blend of literature, social commentary, politics, and romance.

Ha! I bet you all were thinking I'd include Harry Potter! Well, much as I love how my nephews bonded with me over them, I'm always left feeling slightly unsatisfied and annoyed after reading them. This is Belle the adult talking. These are series that are vastly superior to HP. My nephew and I love The Dark Is Rising series, and if I could get him to go agnostic and abandon his Baptist elementary school training (what were my Buddhist sister and brother-in-law thinking?!) he'd love the atheistic Phillip Pullman novels too. And I grew up with the Little House books. How can you not be charmed by frontier life?

No other books can compare to how foundational these have been to my thinking about race, rights, and the sovereign powers of the law.

Turn Off Version

1. Self-Help/Make Lots of Money Books2. Most "I made it through the rain" pop psych memoirs3. Anything by Ann Coulter and her ilk.

Also suggested by AW:

Blogroll Blogfriend

If there is someone on your blogroll who makes your world a better place just because that person exists and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence on your blog.

(The idea is that you copy that sentence and don't actually give the name[s] of the bloggers on your blogroll who make your world a better place. Which is good, because this would be a very, very long, post indeed if I listed everyone who fits these criteria for me.)